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CNET First Look

The Netgear NightHawk X8 is one big and expensive router

CNET editor Dong Ngo praises the sexiness of the big, expensive and fast Netgear R8500 Nighthawk X8 router and throws out some ideas about what you should be spending money on.

2:25 / 29 October 2015

Transcript

[MUSIC]
Hi guys.
**** Ngo here, and this is the NightHawk X8 router from Netgear.
Now this thing is huge.
In fact, it's so big that if I take the second one out of the box And yeah, like usual, I do have two right here.
People will think that I'm a big show off, especially considering each of this one here costs $400.
Anyhow, the X8 here is expensive, but it's big, because it's the first AC 5300 router on the market.
And that mean it have two five gigahertz bands, each of that cap at 2166 megabits per second wi-fi speed, and one 2.4 gigahertz band that caps at 1000 megabits per second.
Now in real world usage there is no way, and I mean no way you can get that kind of speed.
Not even close.
Because Even the fastest client on the market, like, be it a lap top or a tablet, they have much lower wi-fi caps.
But when it comes to speed, having all those big numbers is always better than having Smaller ones and this router here is future proof.
Now, the X8 have four of these external antennas here and they are active antennas.
To stress on the active notion, let me put an LED on each of them, as you can see.
You actually can turn this light off if you want to.
On the back of the X8 unless like other router, there's a Have 4 but actually 6 LAN ports.
All of these ports are gigabit internet.
Meaning it can deliver up to 1000 Mbps.
These extra two ports can also work together to double the bandwidth to 2 gigabits per second.
And that means, if you have a server that also have a two network port, this is a great router to have.
Now, in my testing with my old server that support port aggregation, these two port here actually improve its performance a great deal.
For more, check out my full review at cnet.com.
Basically, this is a router for the rich.
Which is why it comes with this groovy wavy thing here.
So you're going to say that I spent that much money on a sexy piece of art.
That's good for me though.
Because I'm more used to having those sexy things sitting around talking about spending money on me.
And I like it very much.
And that's because I am [INAUDIBLE] This has been the first look at the Nighthawk X8 router from Netgear.

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